I thought it might be worth saying a bit more about the popularity of this notion of raising an army of foreigners to fight the Iraq War for us. I think this is a problematic concept on its own merits, but beyond that it’s illustrative of the unseriousness of a lot of hawkish commentary these days. We all understand why a draft is politically unfeasible and regarded by the military brass as undesirable anyway. But what about a more serious effort by the big minds behind the endless war policy to get people to sign up?

Michael O’Hanlon is slightly too old for the army, but I bet he’s got some fighting-age research associates and interns over there at Brookings. Barbara and Jenna Bush could sign up, and so could the seemingly unemployed Meghan McCain. Fred Kagan’s eligible to serve at 38 as are various other AEI fellows. But beyond individual people, the institutions of the conservative movement writ large could be encouraging young conservatives to go sign up. They could be selflessly offering to wage the battle of ideas purely with the too old, the disabled, and the openly gay as their comrades in arms, while urging young and healthy rightwingers to go sign up. Not only would that have some direct impact on the manpower situation, but the demonstration effect on the remaining pro-war 30-35 percent of the country could be large. Meanwhile, if it worked it would be a significant rejoinder to criticisms from Democrats and others that the force is being unduly strained.

But it’s not happening and it’s not going to happen. And the significance of that observation isn’t to call the people who aren’t making it happen “chicken.” The point is just that if, chicken or not, you really thought Iraq was the central front in a world-historical struggle against Islamofascism you’d be leading recruiting drives. You’d be signing up yourself if eligible to serve, and you’d be encouraging young people over whom you have some sway or influence to do the same. But though a lot of people say all kinds of things about the enormously high stakes in Iraq, few people’s revealed preferences indicate that they believe it. I don’t think it makes sense to say that everyone who favors some given military operation has an obligation to join the service (among other things, I’m familiar with more than one person who decided to enlist after 9/11 in order to fight al-Qaeda and wound up in Iraq) but in light of the fact that there are very real recruiting problems it seems like something that ought to be taken more seriously. But at a minimum, it seems to me that people ought to bring their war-related rhetoric more in line with their actual war-related behavior.

UPDATE: Important factual error-like thing in the post, Jason Zengerle notes that McCain has a son in the Marines and another in the naval academy. I didn’t know that McCain even had sons. That obviously puts the point about Meghan McCain in a very different context.

Dan Froomkin observes that Bernard Lewis “hinted in an Aug. 8, 2006, Wall Street Journal op-ed that Ahmadinejad might be planning a nuclear attack on Israel just two weeks later, on the date in the Islamic calendar when the Prophet Muhammad made his mystical journey to Jerusalem.” But so what? There’s a lot of garbage printed in the WSJ opinion pages.

Well, it just so happens that Vice President Dick Cheney went on Hugh Hewitt’s radio show last week and explained that this kind of forecasting is guiding his approach to Iran policy:

I mean, if I look at what [Ahmadenijad's] beliefs supposedly are, the allegation that the return of the 12th Imam is something to be much desired, and that the best contribution that a man can make is to die a martyr facilitating that return, and all that goes with it, I always think of Bernard Lewis, who has said that mutual assured destruction during the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviets meant peace and stability and deterrence. But mutual assured destruction in the hands of Ahmadinejad may just be an incentive.

Matt Duss notes that there are some other respects in which Lewis’ foreign policy advice seems to have gone awry, but at a minimum one would think that this particular prediction would have caused some to doubt the wisdom of relying on his forecasting of the role Shi’a mysticism plays in Iranian foreign policy. The specifics of Lewis aside, I always find it odd that hawks prefer to rely on this kind of a priori analysis of likely Iranian behavior when the regime in question came into being over two decades ago and has never previously shown any proclivity for deliberately seeking its own destruction.

A gem from the Atlantic archive, William R. Polk’s “The Lesson of Iraq” from our December 1958 issue. His bottom line:

What, in effect, do we want from the Middle East? Any answer must be tentative and subject to revision periodically. At the present, the answer seems to me to be sufficient peace to prevent a world war and a sufficient flow of oil to maintain the European economy. The first is the common interest of most Arabs, who are in earnest when they insist on “positive neutralism.” Of the second, two points must be made: on the one hand, Europe now depends for 80 per cent of her oil on the Middle East, but she could be supplied, admittedly at greater cost, from other sources. On the other hand, the sale of oil is the major source of revenue for many of the Arab countries and is the only hope for those who plan, as does the new generation of nationalists, large-scale development programs—and the only customer for all of the Middle Eastern oil is Europe. Let us not forget that our essential policy interests are identical with those of the Arabs.

I think that this continues to contain a lot of wisdom. Certainly, to follow one of the main themes of the piece, our efforts to micro-manage domestic political outcomes in the Arab world haven’t had a ton of success.

Photo by Flickr user skampy used under a Creative Commons license

Kevin Drum and Phil Carter discuss length of combat tours and counterinsurgency, and conclude that there’s no answer. As Kevin says “Short tours don’t give you enough time to learn the ground and the people, but long tours eat up the troops. There’s no good middle ground.”

Carter’s suggestion to try to make sure to re-deploy people back to the same place they’d deployed to previously does seem like one step in the direction of a middle ground. Another necessary step would, I think, be to make sure that we’re very leery as a matter of national strategy from getting involved in these kind of situations rather than deluded ourselves into thinking that some doctrinal improvements suddenly make the impossible possible. Last simply a sense of scale — there’s a whole lot of different kinds of things that can fall under the counterinsurgency or stability operations heading many of which are much less giant, manpower intensive, and infeasible than what’s happening in Iraq. I hear different things, for example, about the merits of our ongoing counterinsurgency assistance to Colombia but it’s certainly not creating some unbearable strain on our military. Simply avoiding situations that require hundreds of thousands of American soldiers for a years-long mission seems like the most important piece of the puzzle.

Progress toward effective governance in Iraq?

The Iraqi government has dismissed 1,300 soldiers and policemen who deserted or refused to fight during last month’s Shiite-on-Shiite battles in Basra, it said Sunday.

How do you fire a deserter? It seems that someone named Paul Jane Pilzer wrote a book called Should You Quit Before You’re Fired that may be relevant to this issue, but I’d recommend buying my book instead.

Don’t miss Blake Hounshell on why the surge is beside the point because Iraq is just an extremely poor candidate country for the kind of maximalist goals that Bush and McCain cite in defense of the endeavor:

We must not forget that even a perfect surge would still have left the United States chasing an expected strategic payoff—a stable, democratic Iraq—that is extremely unlikely to be realized for decades, if at all. It’s one thing to ask American soldiers to lay their lives on the line for freedom and democracy, or to safeguard their country from weapons of mass destruction. But who wants to be the last man to die for Nuri al-Maliki?

I certainly don’t. And while the unfortunate reality is that more Americans certainly will die in this dubious cause I’d like to see that number brought as low as possible through a speedy withdrawal of our forces.

At the beginning of this web video, Michael O’Hanlon explains that the current pace of deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan isn’t sustainable. He also notes that the situation in Iraq is “nowhere near an acceptable or sustainable outcome.” Under the circumstances, one might think that giving up on the Iraq operation in order to focus on Afghanistan in a sustainable way would be a good idea. But, of course, O’Hanlon believes we need to continue the war in Iraq indefinitely, even though he knows that such a policy isn’t sustainable.

The solution, naturally enough, is foreign mercenaries. As he puts it, we need to go into “countries that have a fairly strong pro-American tendency and a very minimal al-Qaeda presence” and try to get their citizens to sign up, with the lure of U.S. citizenship offered as the bait. He gave the Philippines as an example (indeed, as many as 41 percent of Filipinos regard our military presence in the Middle East as bolstering stability, which is unusually high), and said that Donald Rumsfeld would go down in history as a bad Secretary of Defense specifically for his failure to implement a program of this sort. My feeling is that when it comes to this is when we can officially say that the American imperial project in Iraq has reached its decadent phase.

I mean, isn’t this almost a self-refuting argument? According to Michael O’Hanlon, the only way to have any chance at accomplishing our mission in Iraq is to bolster our military by recruiting large numbers of foreigners into our armed services and this becomes an argument for recruiting the foreigners rather than ending the war. Really?